my sweating Greyhound.
i haven't been home in three days. off on some sort of adventure through suburbia. these things come out of nowhere and who am i to say NO?
unexpected and totally welcome, i didn't have these adventures when i lived in a suburb. i was wound up way too tight for that. or maybe i had snooty standards? or maybe i just had the correct reading on life in the suburbs and knew those aristocrats cannot be trusted. i mean no offense, y'all just believe in too false a God. i must breathe more honestly than what your picket fences allow. i'm grown enough to know that human beings are a strange, strange species and there are no easy explanations for anything. we are (i am) driven by a need to find some sort of comfort after enduring such a steep and horriffic sadness... and we tend to find said comfort in the glass confines of an illicit bottle if denied the soft mouth of another. and so, i learned the hard way, again, that drinking an entire bottle of Korbel bought from a Wallgreens at 1:45am will, if drunk by a single individual (me) (even if over the course of several hours), result in such a tormented stomach that the act of eating itself becomes the most torturous experience there is... even days later. the only sparkling wine one should drink should be the real thing: champagne. at least then the resulting horror story might possess an air of romance (though, if i may remind you, i am never without romance. i am a romantic human being and i know how to create romance wherever i go. if you are ever in doubt as to how one accomplishes romance i have two words for you: back scratch. simply scratch the back of whomever you are with, especially if it is a friend, and you have abolished all trashiness from the current situation. trust. ). and so tonight, on a ravaged stomach, i made myself a Szechuan dinner and it was the first thing i've really eaten in days ( ...should i really be telling you this?).
still, we breathed at each other's mouths. we panted at the open wish. we stared at each other, point blank, and he asked me if i was an atheist. i said i didn't know. i confessed to him that i had once been thoroughly convinced that there was a God (for my entire life) but, when watching my mother die, He died as well, right before my eyes. he ate a bag of chocolate malt balls and i listened to his ideas about humanity. as i poured another damned glass of Korbel we discussed mortality and i pulled the shoes and socks off his feet. we sat across from each other in deep hotel armchairs and i massaged his feet like a Christ.
i loved listening to him. he had such a slow, lovely southern drawl.
these are the strange rooms i sometimes am lucky enough to stumble in to. i am granted the honor and pleasure of witnessing the humanity of another. i learn. and then i come home and pull off my worn clothes, i listen to The Smashing Pumpkins and think of a bed in New York, blues guitar and the delirious dreams that followed on the echo of those plucked strings...
and i am left wondering what the hell the world is trying to teach me.
